He was silent, and stood with folded arms, looking down gloatingly on Mauer.  He did not observe that in the shadow between the wall and the bed a head was raised.  Suddenly a dark form rose, shadowy and indistinct.  Jonathan grew pale.  “Inez!” he gasped, and shrank back.

“No.  Carmen; who has heard your cruel words, so that the silent lips shall not take the dark story of your wickedness to the grave.  Wretch! devil incarnate!  Can the earth hold such infamous scum? and has Heaven no lightning with which to strike you dead?  Oh, father, my poor, persecuted father!  There are no words to tell what you have suffered through this man!” And she threw herself again by the bed, and cast her arms about her dying parent.

But a glorious light of heavenly peace had settled on those pale features.  With newly-acquired strength, he returned his daughter’s embrace, raised his hands, and cried with accents of joy:  “Child, rejoice, praise the Lord with me, for your father can now appear before his Judge, innocent of this crime.  Blessed be God forever—­amen!”

He stretched out his arms and sank back; one more sigh, as if the liberated soul were unfolding its wings to be borne on the breeze to heaven, and he lay still and peaceful in his daughter’s arms.

With heart-rending sobs, she rained kisses on his hands, his lips, his brow; then closing his weary eyes, she whispered tenderly, amid scalding tears, “Dear father, sleep sweetly; you have earned it well!”

Some movement in the chamber of death attracted Carmen’s notice, despite her overwhelming sorrow.  She started up quickly.  Who dared to intrude upon her thus?  It was Jonathan, who was trying to make his escape from the room.

“Jonathan Fricke!” she cried, drawing herself up to her full height and at her call he seemed as if rooted to the ground.  She passed around the bed, stepped to the table, and moved the lamp so as to throw a brighter light over the calm, placid features of the dead, around whose mouth a happy smile still lingered.

“Look on that face!” she said in a voice of command.  Her face was all ablaze with righteous indignation, and she stood menacingly, but wondrously beautiful, before him, like an avenging angel ready to plunge the criminal down into the depths of hell.

“Do you see this holy, peaceful rest?  Will you be able, some day, to lie down thus when the Lord demands an account of your life?  You turn away your eyes, but you will never succeed in banishing the image of this face from your memory; it will haunt you wherever you go, by day and by night; its perpetual presence will be my father’s revenge here below, and his accusation above, before the throne of judgment.”

Humiliated and cowed, Jonathan stood motionless before the scathing contempt of this noble woman.

“Do not think my father concealed his fault from me,” she continued, her voice growing deeper and more threatening, as if the indignation surging up within her had lent it new power.  “I know everything.  I know how it happened; that, in a moment of weakness and temptation, the evil spirit drew near and enticed him.  But he sinned in thought only; the All-merciful prevented the deed.  How does his sin compare with yours, in the eyes of the One above?”